I am trying to get my laptop working through my Lenovo docking station (https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/accessories-and-monitors/docking/usb-docks-universal-cable-docks/Thinkpad-USB-C-Dock/p/40A90090UK) however I am running into some issues.
I wanted to do my due diligence and get some input before I go ahead and get another docking station, in case I can get this one working.
Firstly, when I connect the laptop to the docking station there are only two things that work, the mouse and the keyboard, the monitors are black and do not show anything.
I have had a look through dmesg, both on boot and after hot connecting to the docking station, I see no results for my monitor brand, or display, or DisplayLink. This leads me to believe that that hardware is just not even being seen.
I have tried to connect to the dock using the DisplayLink driver, and without using the DisplayLink driver, following this article (https://support.system76.com/articles/docking-station/).
A couple of weird things that I am not sure if I am just missing something, or it is not working correctly:
- When looking through the install script for DisplayLink it says it creates a service called display-manager.service, even after installing, and also after rebooting I cannot see the service, it provides an error.
- I cannot see any running process for DisplayLink (ps | grep Display)
- The log directory /var/log/displaylink is empty.
This makes me think that DisplayLink is not operating correct, or it is not installed correctly, however I got no errors when running the install script.
If I had of seen the lack of dmesg output for the monitors and not looked any further, then I would have called it a day, but I also looked at xrandr, and this is the part that is confusing me.
Before I connected to the dock, I ran xrandr -q and I could see 1 display, just the eDP-1, which I presume is the laptop monitor, however after connecting to the docking station I could see more outputs:
~ > xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 16384 x 16384
eDP-1 connected primary 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 344mm x 193mm
1920x1080 144.15*+ 60.01 59.97 59.96 60.20 59.93
[...]
HDMI-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DVI-I-5-4 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DVI-I-4-3 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DVI-I-3-2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DVI-I-2-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP-1-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
This is after I installed the DisplayLink drivers, before I installed them I didn't have 7 extra, I had like 3 extra.
This is the confusing part, because dmesg did not detect the hardware, but xrandr detected more inputs. I also tried to set the provider output source with xrandr --setprovideroutputsource 1 0, but no luck.
~ > xrandr --listproviders
Providers: number : 6
Provider 0: id: 0x45 cap: 0x9, Source Output, Sink Offload crtcs: 4 outputs: 2 associated providers: 5 name:modesetting
Provider 1: id: 0x2fd cap: 0x2, Sink Output crtcs: 1 outputs: 1 associated providers: 1 name:modesetting
Provider 2: id: 0x2db cap: 0x2, Sink Output crtcs: 1 outputs: 1 associated providers: 1 name:modesetting
Provider 3: id: 0x2b9 cap: 0x2, Sink Output crtcs: 1 outputs: 1 associated providers: 1 name:modesetting
Provider 4: id: 0x297 cap: 0x2, Sink Output crtcs: 1 outputs: 1 associated providers: 1 name:modesetting
Provider 5: id: 0x26f cap: 0x2, Sink Output crtcs: 4 outputs: 2 associated providers: 1 name:NVIDIA-G0
Not sure what other output would be useful to provide, I have an Nvidia 3050
